Recently in Health Category

As a day job, I work with back-end computer support, and every once in a while a systems check is performed to make sure everything is running optimal.  Likewise, I think individuals should engage in a 'self-check' every so often.  More so, those that are involved in social affairs should do this especially as to not become immersed in their own manure.

Read below:

Latino registered voters rank education, the cost of living, jobs and health care as the most important issues in the fall campaign, with crime lagging a bit behind those four and the war in Iraq and immigration still farther behind. On each of these seven issues, Obama is strongly favored over McCain--by lopsided ratios ranging from about three-to-one on education, jobs, health care, the cost of living and immigration, to about two-to-one on Iraq and crime.

I don't know if they are ranked in order (too lazy to look at report), but I would put those as my top four.  So in a nutshell, even though I've been MIA, I feel I'm still in touch with the Latino heart.  After all, the Latino heart is a human heart, and these issues are what all Americans are concerned about.  I'd be curious to what issues some readers and writers of Latino Blogs are deemed most important.

Apparently we need to keep our fellow Latinos informed since we have the highest percentage of new cases of AIDS or HIV:

AIDS rates in the nation's Latino community are increasing and, with little notice, have reached what experts are calling a simmering public health crisis.

Though Hispanics make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population, they represented 22 percent of new HIV and AIDS diagnoses tallied by federal officials in 2006. According to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Hispanics in Washington, D.C., have the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country.

So far, the toll of AIDS in the nation's largest and fastest growing minority population has mostly been overshadowed by the epidemic among African Americans and gay white men. Yet in major U.S. cities, as many as one in four gay Hispanic men has HIV, a rate on par with sub-Saharan Africa.

Emphasis added.  There's really no reason for this.  But this is what is allegedly going on:

Blacks still have the highest HIV rates in the country, but language difficulties, cultural barriers and, in many cases, issues of legal status make the threat in the Hispanic community unique. For those who arrived illegally, in particular, fear of arrest and deportation presents a daunting obstacle to seeking diagnosis and treatment.

Well, if it's a language barrier, lets make it clear right now:

Latino, protégete.  Usa condones de latex.  Si no lo haces, corres el riesgo de contraer AIDS SIDA.  Y el AIDS SIDA te matará a tí y a los que te lleves por el medio, sin pena ni gloria.  Protege tu vida y la de los tuyos.

Updated on 7/25/2008:
(Thanks Cai, although I think most everyone knows that AIDS is SIDA.  But just in case . . . )